Some young people come to the cyber cafe with their resume on floppies or cds in order to send via email. Usually the individual computers do not have floppy or cd drives. So they give the floppy or cd to the cafe personnel who will copy it to the individual's computer from the server. The files are usually copied to My Documents folder or the desktop. Sometimes the user will attach the resume documents to the email and will go home without deleting the original documents especially if it is not on the desktop. Even if they delete the documents they sometimes forget to empty the recycle bin. Some files can be recovered using utilities like pc-inspector (site: www.pcinspector.de). If possible it is always better to use software which overwrites the files before deleting the file. An example is the open source program eraser (site: www.tolvanen.com) or try sourceforge (site: sourceforge.net ).
The first important rule is to never tell the cyber cafe owner your email ID and password to check your mail. This may sound dumb but keep in mind that many old folks and small kids have no idea about the risks of spam and information theft. Email IDs and passwords should always be entered by their owners. At most, they should ask for guidance to the log-in screen to enter their details personally. Another important rule is the practice of people coming with their floppies, CDs or pen-drives to send their resumes via email. Usually, the individual computers have neither floppy nor CD drives (and some places prohibit independent use of pen- drives for security reasons). The media is hence run through the server itself before being transferred to the relevant individual’s PC. After sending these documents, the user forgets about deleting the documents on the original server. More than simply emptying the Recycle Bin, you should ensure the cyber cafe has a file shredder program to properly delete the files. Resumes contain many personal details, and you should avoid all risk of these being exposed.
People who use messenger software
should log out properly after using the messenger software. Some people just
close the messenger software without logging out, some software do not shut
down, it will just minimize to the system tray without logging you out so that
the next user after you can use your account if he so wishes. The same is true
for properly logging out of email accounts like yahoo. As in the previous
paragraph, you should go through the options in the messenger software like 'remember
my id on this computer.You should also take care to disable options that
allow archiving of messages as text files. This helps in keeping conversations
private and personal info usually shared online safe. Finally, whenever you go
to a cyber cafe, ensure it has the most up-to date anti-virus and spyware
definitions. These will help root out Trojan horses and key loggers responsible
for tracking your activity and recording your passwords/IDs.
Users of public computers should be aware of the existence of some dangerous softwares like key loggers, trojan horses, etc. Key loggers are software which run in the background (usually will not show up in the running program's list) and records the computer users keystrokes which might include passwords and sensitive data and saves the keystrokes as encrypted files on the computer itself or sends the files as email to the person who installed the keylogger. A funny thing about key loggers is that some of the key logging softwares are commercialy sold to parents who want to keep a watch on their children's activities on their computer's or to people who want to spy on their spouses. Some of the key loggers can be detected by antivirus softwares and also by using spyware detection software like spybot search and destroy (site: www.safer-networking.org) or ad-aware (site: www.lavasoft.de ).
